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Hey, is that a grasshopper in your soup? Well eat it! And while you’re at it, dig into some ant larvae, crickets, palm weevils and maguey worms.

That’s what a group of insect-eating McGill University students wants us all to do – gobble up bugs. They’re tasty, eco-friendly, protein-rich and are ripe for the taking.

So that’s just what I did. Hey, what’s a few crunchy chapulines between new friends – deep-roasted grasshoppers tossed with a dash of garlic, lime and chili. Yummy – and crunchy too. If you’re not up eating whole insects, how about grasshopper-infused chocolate chips, power bars and potato chips? These are coming to a store near you soon.

It’s smart food, but North Americans might have trouble stomaching the concept of eating bugs and getting past the ick factor, admits Jesse Pearlstein, a student at McGill and member of the award-winning Aspire Food Group, which is out to change the way we think about bugs and give the insect cuisine movement some legs.

So far Aspire has come up with Flour Power, a protein-rich flour made up of ground grasshoppers, which they’re using to make tortilla chips. They plan to incorporate other bugs and grow their snack food offerings. Getting buggy has big benefits: They’re high in protein, vitamins and minerals. Insects are not only comparable in protein to beef pound-for-pound, but raising them has a much smaller environmental impact, says Pearlstein, adding that one third of the planet eats insects.

Here’s why you should eat bugs, according to Jesse Pearlstein, Aspire Food Group:

· Insects are a power food: for an equivalent amount of traditional livestock, insects (or micro-livestock) have a comparable amount of protein and six times the iron, calcium, zinc and other nutrients.

· Insects consume drastically less land, water and feed per kilogram of yield: Per weight of output, compared to the farming of traditional livestock - think cattle, poultry and swine - the farming of micro-livestock consumes 11 times less land, 33 times less water and six times less feed.

· There are a growing number of emerging North American based start-ups focused on different culinary applications of insect-based protein, including higher end restaurants and convenient prepared meals to energy bars and snack foods. Most of these companies didn’t exist three to five years ago.

· Insects are less likely to make us sick. Insects are taxonomically very distant from humans, which makes them less likely to transmit diseases - a good thing in the era of food-borne maladies like SARS, H5N1, and mad-cow disease.

· Insects are equally or more versatile than traditional livestock with respect to incorporating into all recipes.

· Six legs are better than four and insects are everywhere!

Hey, escargot, cavier and calamari are considered delicacies, so why not giant water bugs, wax worms, and deep fried scorpions? “Thirty years ago the idea of eating raw fish was considered vile. Today, you can’t walk two or three blocks without seeing a sushi restaurant in a city like Toronto,” says Pearlstein, who believes that the parallel to sushi is compelling for the inevitability of an uptake in insect consumption in the near term for emerging markets.